Clay's Ark

by Octavia E. Butler

  She shook her head. “Rane did.”

  “Why?”

  She stared at him for several seconds. “You don’t remember, do you?” She took a step farther back from him. “Jesus, I wish I didn’t.”

  He said nothing, could not make himself speak.

  She went to the window, pushed the drape aside, and seemed to examine the frame. “This house won’t burn,” she said. “Light it and it will smolder a little, then go out. Eli’s people have tried lighting it a few times. I think one of them was shot in the attempt.”

  “They tried to burn the house with us in it?”

  “Badger called for help on his radio. They heard him. Or if they didn’t hear him, they heard me when I repeated what he said next to the kitchen window.” She turned to face him. “I can hear them sometimes, Dad. When the car people aren’t making too much noise, I can hear them talking. I heard Eli.”

  “Saying what?”

  “That if everything goes okay, the car people will go over to him when their symptoms begin. If it doesn’t, if the help Badger called for actually comes, Eli might have to sacrifice us.”

  “Sacrifice … ?”

  “They have some explosives already planted. They don’t want to do it, but … well, they can’t let anyone in the house leave.”

  “Kerry, did I rape you?” He had said the words. And somehow, they had not choked him.

  She swallowed, went to the door and stood beside it. “Almost.”

  “Oh God. Oh God, I’m sorry.”

  “I know.”

  “Rane stopped me?”

  “Yes.” She hesitated. “Rane stopped us. I … I wasn’t exactly fighting.”

  He frowned, repelled and uncomprehending.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Keira said. “I know how I smell to you—and how you smell to me. I had to see you to be sure you were okay. But … I’m afraid of you—and of myself. It’s so crazy. Rane hit me mostly to get my attention so I’d stop fighting her when she tried to pull me away. She said when she hit you, you didn’t seem to feel it.” Keira rubbed her face. “I sure felt it.”

  Blake moved away from her because he wanted to move toward her so badly. “Were you hurt otherwise?”

  “No.”

  “How do you feel?”

  She stared past him, surprising him with the beginnings of a smile. “Hungry,” she said. “Hungry again.”

  Keira believed she was going to live. She felt stronger and hungry. Her hearing was startlingly keen. That was enough for her. The fact that she was still a captive, still the carrier of a dangerous disease, still caught between warring gangs had almost ceased to matter to her. Those things could not cease to matter to Blake.

  When Petra had taken Keira away, he went over the bare room as he could not have with bound hands and feet. He peeled back the rug, looking for loose flooring. He examined the walls, even the ceiling. Finally, he examined the closet-like bathroom—a toilet, a sink, and a tiny window that did not open. None of the windows opened. The air conditioning was good. The air stayed fresh and probably would until Eli decided to foul it, but the air-conditioning ducts were too small to be of use to Blake.

  Because he was desperate, Blake tried pushing at the glass—or the plastic—in the window. It was only one small pane. It might be breakable.

  It did not break. But the frame gave a little. Blake took off his shirt, wrapped his right hand in it, and as quietly as he could, began trying to pound the entire window out. Even if he knocked it loose, the hole would be almost too small to crawl through. But he felt stronger now, and anything would be better than sitting around like a caged animal, waiting for someone else to decide his fate.

  When his right hand tired, he continued the pounding with his left. The muffled sound was loud to him, but no one else seemed to notice. He realized now that he could not trust his hearing to tell him what sounds might be reaching normal people.

  Finally, the window fell out onto the ground. The noise that it made when it hit and bumped against the house was loud. Blake heard someone call out, then heard the sound of approaching motors. Frightened, he hesitated. Keira had said Badger had called for reinforcements. What if he escaped from one group into the hands of another? On the other hand, if he stayed where he was, the window would be discovered and he would be shackled again. They would take no more chances with him.

  As the sounds of approaching motors grew louder, he made up his mind. He was at the rear of the house. He could not see the road or the approaching cars or cycles so he was certain the newcomers would not be able to see him. Eli’s people might see him, but he did not think they would shoot. He hoped he could escape them too and get real help. Medical help, finally. Meanwhile, he prayed they would rescue the girls and keep them safe—since he could no longer trust himself near them.

  He feared that if he reached a town, a hospital, his chances of seeing the girls again would be slim. They would be going into Eli’s world, going underground, becoming whatever the organism would make of them. He would be beginning a war against the organism.

  He managed to squeeze out of the window, leaving a little skin behind, and drop quietly to the ground. He ran toward the rocks, expecting at every moment to be shot in the back or accosted from the rocks by Eli’s people. But in front of the house, the approaching cars had arrived and the shooting had begun. All the hostilities were there.

  Blake ran on. From the rocks, he could climb into the hills and get a look around. He could find out where the road was, figure out which way was north. He could head for Needles—on foot this time. He could do the necessary things—give his warnings, get the research started.

  He moved quickly, but with no feeling of triumph this time. He wondered whether Rane and Keira would understand his leaving them. He wondered whether they would forgive him. He knew better than to suppose he would forgive himself.

  A jack rabbit leaped into his path, and without thinking, he leaped after it, caught it, snapped its neck. Before he could reflect on what he had done, he heard human footsteps. And before he could take cover in the rocks, someone shot him.

  He felt a burning in his left side. Terrified, he dropped the dead rabbit and fled to the shelter among the rocks. Moments later, frightened and hurting, he stopped. Someone was following him noisily, perhaps trying to get another clear shot. He concealed himself behind a jagged wedge of rock and waited.

  Past 25

  BY THE TIME IT was certain that Jacob Boyd Doyle was not normal, there were two more babies with the same abnormalities.

  Jacob never crawled. At six months, he humped along like a big inchworm. Two months later, he began to toddle on all fours, looking disturbingly like a clumsy puppy or kitten. He walked on his hands and feet rather than crawling on hands and knees. With the help of an adult, he could sit up like a dog or cat begging for food. As time passed, he grew strong enough to do this alone. He learned to sit back on his haunches comfortably while using his hands.

  He was a beautiful, precocious child, but he was a quadruped. His senses were even keener than those of his parents and his strength would have made him a real problem for parents of only normal strength. And he was a carrier. Eli and Meda did not learn this for certain until later, but they suspected it from the first.

  Most important, though, the boy was not human.

  Eli could not accept this. Again and again, he tried to teach Jacob to walk upright. A human child walked upright. A boy, a man, walked upright. No son of Eli’s would run on all fours like a dog.

  Day after day, he kept at Jacob until the little boy sprawled on his stomach and screamed in rebellion.

  “Baby, he’s too young” Meda said not for the first time. “He doesn’t have the balance. His legs aren’t strong enough yet.”

  Chances were, they never would be, and she knew it. She tried to protect the boy from Eli. That shamed and angered Eli so that he could not talk to her about it.

  She tried to protect his son from him!

/>   And perhaps Jacob needed her protection. There were times when Eli could not even look at the boy. What in hell was going to happen to a kid who ran around on all fours? A freak who could not hide his strangeness. What kind of life could he have? Even in this isolated section of desert, he might be mistaken for an animal and shot. And what in heaven’s name would be done with him if he were captured instead of killed? Would he be sent off to a hospital for “study” or caged and restricted like even the best of the various apes able to communicate through sign language? Or would he simply be stared at, harassed, tormented by normal people? If he spread the disease, it would quickly be traced to him. He would definitely be caged or killed then.

  Eli loved the boy desperately, longed to give him the gift of humanity that children everywhere else on earth took for granted. Sometimes Eli sat and watched the boy as he played. At first, Jacob would come over to him and demand attention, even try, Eli believed, to comfort his father or understand his bleakness. Then the boy stopped coming near him. Eli had never turned him away, had even ceased trying to get him to walk upright. In fact, Eli was finally accepting the idea that Jacob would never walk on his hind legs with any more ease or grace than a dog doing tricks. Yet the boy began to avoid him.

  Eli was slow in noticing. Not until he called Jacob and saw that the boy cringed away from him did he realize that it had been many days since Jacob had touched him voluntarily.

  Many days. How many? Eli thought back.

  A week, perhaps. The boy had ceased to come near him or touch him exactly when he began wondering if it were not a cruelty to leave such a hopeless child alive.

  Present 26

  RANE SAT FRIGHTENED AND alone among members of the car family. They had put her on the floor against a wall in what had been the living room of the ranch house. She was still shackled, feeling miserable and tired. Her arms, legs, and back ached with wanting to change position. Once she had inched away from the wall and lain down. The instant she closed her eyes, there was a hand on her left breast and another on her right thigh.

  She had sat up quickly and squirmed away from the hands. The car rats had only laughed. They could have raped her. She thought they might eventually. At that moment, they were preoccupied with the ranch women—a mother and her thirteen-year-old daughter. There was also a twelve-year-old son. Rane had heard some of the car rats had raped him, too. She didn’t doubt it. They had placed her opposite an open hall door that was directly across from the door of the bedroom-cell of what was left of the ranch family. She could not help seeing occasional car rats going in or out, zipping or unzipping their pants. She could not help hearing moaning, pleading, praying, weeping, screaming whenever the room door was opened. The ranch house was solidly built. Sounds did not carry well unless doors were open. Rane suspected the car rats had put her where she was so that she could see and hear what was in store for her.

  They were watching a movie from the ranch family’s library—a 1998 classic about the Second Coming of Christ. There had been a whole genre of such films just before the turn of the century. Some were religious, some antireligious, some merely exploitive—Sodom-and-Gomorrah films. Some were cause-oriented—God arrives as a woman or a dolphin or a throwaway kid. And some were science fiction. God arrives from Eighty-two Eridani Seven.

  Well, maybe God had arrived a few years later from Proxima Centauri Two. God in the form of a deadly little microbe that for its own procreation made a father try to rape his dying daughter—and made the daughter not mind.

  Rane squeezed her eyes shut, willing the tears not to come again, failing. What was worse? Being raped by three or four car rats before she was ransomed or submitting to Eli’s people and microbe? Or were the two the same now that the car gang was infected? No, she would probably have been safer back with Stephen Kaneshiro, who could have hurt her but had not, who had tried to share part of himself with her even though she had not understood.

  But there was Jacob to think of. All the Jacobs. Stephen Kaneshiro could not give her a human child. It did not matter what the car gang gave her. They would free her as soon as they had the ransom money. Then she could have a doctor take care of the disease and any possible pregnancy. If only the car family did not kill her before the ransom was paid.

  Somehow, in spite of the noise from across the hall, in spite of its effect on her, she fell asleep sitting up. If there were more hands, she did not feel them.

  When she awoke, she was intensely hungry. The movie was over, and the car rats were shooting and shouting and stinking with sweat so foul she could almost taste it. Her first impulse was to try to drag herself away from them, but her hunger was too intense. Even her head throbbed with it.

  She begged the nearest car rat for food, but he shoved her aside with one foot and kept reloading guns as they were passed to him. Most were not passed to him. Their users reloaded them themselves in a couple of seconds. Others were older, slower, more likely to jam. These the reloader handled.

  Helplessly, automatically, Rane inched toward the kitchen. She knew where it was. She and Keira had been left in it when they were rescued from their father.

  Rane shook her aching head, not wanting to think about that. She did not know where Keira was or what was happening to her. She cared, but she did not want to think about it now. She was not even sure where her father was. She worried about him because he was obviously sick. He might hurt himself and not even know it. The car rats might hurt him because he could not respond to their orders. But as worried as she was about him, she could not keep her mind on him. She was so weak, so sick with hunger, and the kitchen seemed so far away.

  She was not sure how far she had gone across the vast room when someone stopped her.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going, sis? What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m hungry,” she gasped.

  “Hungry? Shit, you’re sick. You’re soaking wet.”

  Rane managed to look up, see that it was a deep-voiced woman who had stopped her, not a man as she had thought. Of course. She smelled like a woman. Rane shook her head, trying to remember whether men and women had always smelled noticeably different. But she could not keep her mind on the question.

  “Please,” she begged, “just give me some food.”

  “You’re probably not even strong enough to eat.”

  “Please,” Rane wept. She had done more crying in the past few days than she had in the past several years. What would happen if the woman prevented her from reaching food? She was already in more pain than she thought could result from hunger.

  “You get back to your place and keep from underfoot,” the woman said. She was large and blocky. Rane at her best could not have gotten past her. Now, all but helpless, Rane felt herself dragged back to her place at the wall.

  “Stay put!” the woman said, then stomped away in her heavy boots. Immediately, Rane began crawling toward the kitchen again. She could not help herself.

  She had her hand stepped on once, painfully, and someone shouted at her and cursed her, but no one stopped her again. She reached the kitchen, noticed peripherally that someone had found a gunport there alongside the sink. A bald, shirtless man stood before it, firing mechanically. The man had enough hair on his body to cover several heads.

  A gorilla, Rane thought. No more human than the things he was firing at. Jesus, was anyone negotiating with her grandparents or were they all here trying to kill Eli’s people? How long had the siege gone on? Two days? Three? More? She could not remember.

  She managed to drag herself upright by using the handles of the large refrigerator, then stand while she pulled one of the doors open. There was little food to be found. A few fresh vegetables—tomatoes, a limp carrot, two cucumbers, green onions, green beans.

  She ate everything she could find. By the time the shooting let up and the hairy man on the other side of the kitchen had time to pay attention to her, she had opened the other side of the refrigerator and found several steaks pr
obably intended for the night’s dinner. The steaks were raw, some of them still icy. There was some cooked meat, too—what was left of a pair of large roasts scraped together onto one platter.

  Without thinking Rane chose the raw meat. Its coldness disturbed her but the fact that it was raw did not even penetrate her consciousness until she had cleaned the bone of the first steak and was beginning the second. Raw smelled better than cooked, that was all.

  Finally she began to feel stronger, aware enough for her bloody hands and the bloody meat she held to startle her. She had never liked her meat even medium rare, had always eaten it well-done or, as Keira said, burned. But this meat, except for its coldness, was the best thing she had ever tasted.

  Now the car rat saw what she was doing, and, amazed, came to take the second steak from her. She did her best to bite off one of his fingers. If her bound hands and feet had not restricted her movement, she would have succeeded. As it was, her unexpected swiftness and ferocity drove the car rat back.

  “Goddamn,” he said staring at her as she tore off a piece of steak. “Goddamn, you and your whole family are crazy.”

  He was an ape. Heavy brow ridges, flattened, broken nose, body hair no one would believe. But now that she had eaten, now that she felt stronger, she realized he smelled interesting.

  She finished her steak while he watched, repelled and fascinated. Then she wiped her mouth and smiled. “I won’t hurt you,” she said, knowing he would laugh.

  He laughed humorlessly “Damn right you won’t, sis.”

  “I was hungry.”

  “You were crazy—are crazy.”

  He liked her. She could see it as clearly as though that wary face of his were leering.

  “So?” she said, shrugging. “Who the hell isn’t crazy these days?” One of her father’s patients had said that to her—a young thief with skin as smooth as Keira’s except where acid had scarred him. He had been brought to the enclave hospital for special treatment and had laughed at her when she tried to talk him out of leaving the hospital and going back to his gang. He could not get even with the acid thrower, he said, until he was with his own again. This in spite of the fact that his own had run away and left him writhing on the ground.